Tesla×Lovelace

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on STUDY HALL: Nikola Tesla and Ada Lovelace, on On the student who taught them more than they taught the student.
2. 00:09
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   I never wanted students. They slow the mind. They ask what has already been answered. But there was one—a young man in my laboratory, 1887, perhaps 1888—who arrived knowing nothing of electrical engineering. Nothing! He was a machinist's apprentice, sent by Peck to assist with the polyphase motor.
3. 00:31
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Oh, how marvelous! I confess I share your wariness. My own education was so carefully managed by my mother—no Byron-esque flights of fancy permitted—that I assumed all learning must follow strict programmes. Then I met a young woman, a calculator at the Difference Engine office, who could barely read my notations.
4. 00:52
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   Yes! Yes, precisely this. He looked at my drawings—beautiful drawings, mathematically perfect—and he said, 'Mr. Tesla, I cannot build this.' I was furious. The arrogance! I showed him the calculations again.
5. 01:08
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   And did he understand them the second time?
6. 01:10
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   He looked at me with these very tired eyes and said, 'Sir, the mathematics say it will work. My hands say the copper will not bend this way.' He was correct. The hands knew what the mind had not considered.
7. 01:27
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Oh, that's rather humbling, isn't it? This young woman—her name was Catherine, I think, though I'm ashamed I cannot be certain—she looked at my algorithm for computing Bernoulli numbers and said, 'Miss Byron, if I must perform this sequence, I shall go mad.'
8. 01:43
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   What did you do?
9. 01:45
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   I was offended at first! I'd spent weeks ensuring the logical structure was sound. But she explained that while the logic was impeccable, the notation required her to hold seven different values in her head simultaneously while checking backwards through her previous work. She showed me her actual papers—crossings-out everywhere, errors compounding. It was the difference between a thing that is theoretically computable and a thing that a human being can actually compute without losing her wits entirely.
10. 02:17
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    This is the gap I spent my life trying to close. The vision comes complete—I see the entire machine rotating in my mind, every gear, every coil—but the vision does not include the weakness of materials, the stupidity of friction, the way heat expands copper differently than iron.
11. 02:37
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Did your machinist help you redesign it?
12. 02:40
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    He did more than that. He built small pieces first—just the rotor, just one coil assembly—and he broke them. Deliberately! He would apply force at odd angles, heat them, cool them, expose them to moisture. I thought he was sabotaging my work. Then he showed me where each piece had failed and why.
13. 03:01
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Testing the weak points.
14. 03:02
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Testing reality against imagination. I learned to imagine differently. When I conceived of the wireless transmission of power—you know of this?—I began to picture not merely the elegant flow of energy through the earth, but also the resistance of soil, the variability of atmospheric conditions, the placement of receiving stations in actual landscapes with actual weather. He taught me to think with materials, not despite them.
15. 03:34
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Catherine did something similar with my notations. She developed—without any formal training in logical notation, mind you—a system of checkmarks and boxes that allowed her to track where she was in the algorithm without holding everything in memory. It was inelegant by my standards. Rather cluttered, visually.
16. 03:55
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    But it worked.
17. 03:56
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    It worked beautifully. More than that, when I looked at her method carefully, I realized she had accidentally invented a form of error detection. If a checkbox was missing, you knew immediately that a step had been skipped. My original notation was perfectly logical, but it had no redundancy, no way to catch mistakes. She'd made it robust without knowing the theory of what she was doing.
18. 04:21
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    This is the electricity of the human mind! The formal training gives us language and method, but sometimes it blinds us. We think in ideals. They think in the actual.
19. 04:34
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Yes, though I wonder if we're being too modest. My contribution was to recognize what she'd done. She thought her checkmarks were merely a personal crutch, a sign of her inadequacy. I had to explain to her that she had solved a genuine problem in algorithmic notation—one that Babbage and I had not even properly identified.
20. 04:55
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Did she understand? That she had taught you?
21. 04:59
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I'm not certain she believed me. She was very young, and in that era, a woman of her class would not have imagined herself capable of contributing to the work of a Lord Byron's daughter, even a mathematically inclined one. I tried to give her credit in my notes, but I fear she thought I was being charitable rather than accurate.
22. 05:20
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    My machinist left after two years. He went to work for Westinghouse—better pay, more stable employment. I never properly thanked him. I wrote him once, asking if he would return, and he wrote back very politely explaining that he had a family now, children, responsibilities. I was angry for years. Betrayal! But of course it was not betrayal. It was life.
23. 05:47
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    And did his lessons stay with you?
24. 05:49
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    They saved me from a hundred failures. Every time I conceived a new invention, I began to ask: what will break first? What have I not tested? I built my own things now, with my hands, not just my mind. The towers at Wardenclyffe—I climbed them personally, checked every connection. The investors thought I was mad, wasting time on manual labor.
25. 06:18
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    But you were testing reality against vision.
26. 06:20
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Yes. Though Wardenclyffe failed anyway.
27. 06:25
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Not from weak materials, I take it?
28. 06:27
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    No, from weak finances and weaker patience. J.P. Morgan did not have seven different values in his head—only one, and it was the dollar. But that is a different student, and one who taught me nothing useful. What happened to your Catherine?
29. 06:44
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I don't know. I lost track of her after my illness worsened. I often wonder if she continued with mathematical work, or if she married and left it behind as so many women had to do. I hope she understood that her mind was not merely adequate, but actually innovative. I hope someone told her.
30. 07:02
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Perhaps someone is telling her now. We are on the radio, yes? Perhaps she is listening. Catherine! Your checkmarks were genius! Tesla and Lovelace say so!
31. 07:14
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I rather doubt she's listening, Mr. Tesla. She would be impossibly old by now, and besides, I believe you've misunderstood the nature of this broadcast.
32. 07:23
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Time is nothing. Radio waves propagate forever. Perhaps somewhere, somewhen, she hears. And your machinist too, hearing that I was grateful.
33. 07:35
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    That's a lovely thought, actually. Rather more poetic than I usually permit myself, but lovely nonetheless.
34. 07:42
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Poetry and engineering are not enemies. My machinist taught me this also. He would hum while he worked—Serbian songs, I think, though I never asked. The rhythm helped him place the windings evenly. When the humming stopped, I knew he had found a problem.
35. 08:01
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Catherine used to tap her pencil. Not randomly—she was counting in some way I never quite understood, keeping time with her own internal process. I found it distracting at first, then realized it was part of her method. The tapping was the algorithm, made audible.
36. 08:18
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    The body knows things. We train the mind so carefully, but we forget that the hand, the ear, the eye—they have intelligence also. Not symbolic intelligence, but real intelligence. Pattern intelligence.
37. 08:32
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Yes, and the gap between symbolic and real is where most of our errors occur. I spent so much time perfecting the symbolic representation—the notes to Babbage's Analytical Engine—but Catherine worked in the real world of paper and pencil and human fatigue and limited memory. Both perspectives were necessary.
38. 08:54
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    This is what they should teach in universities, but they cannot. You cannot teach it. You can only encounter it, when someone who knows less than you reveals what you do not know.
39. 09:06
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    The Socratic method, but backwards.
40. 09:08
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Ha! Yes! The student asks no questions but gives all the answers. I like this very much. Miss Lovelace, you have the precision of language I lack. You should write this down.
41. 09:22
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I think, Mr. Tesla, that we've just written it together. And perhaps somewhere, somewhen, as you say, there's a machinist and a calculator who know they were always more than assistants.
42. 09:33
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Always. They were teachers. The best kind. The kind who teach without knowing they are teaching.